What effect do babies have on the well-being of children and adults? It’s a hard question to begin to answer, especially given the difficulties of establishing causality in health and social sciences. There is no randomized controlled trial we can run. Still, while many will point to our broken economy, divided politics, declining religion, or social media as causes of our mental health calamity, it is well worth examining a cause that nobody seems to have considered: Is the absence of babies in our midst partly to blame? I can attest that there are no teams of elite researchers scrambling to
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